ModeratorProfessionalCampaign Supporter

I picked mine based on population originally, my first were Atlantic and Pacific, then GL, Europa, Catskills and Chesapeake.

If I were you, based off my experience with all the shards I'd pick Catskills (current best place to RP), Chesapeake (Current site of the Rares Festival), Lake Superior (current best place for pvp) and 3 shards based on your individual interests. If you like EM Events, Lake Austin, Sonoma, Napa Valley and Origin would all be good choices.

Stratics Veteran

it really depends what you do in the game. if your into buying armor, or cross-shard merchanting maybe go for a popular asian shard. PVP maybe Lake Superior as thats been popular lately. If your getting into events, check out a few before you pick and see which shards you like best. Its also very nice to have at least 2 atlantic shields if you do alot of cross-shard farming, eventing, or trading.

ProfessionalAlumni

If you want to be completely independent chose individual shards and stick with the most popular shards. If you dont mind asking for help here and there. Pick nothing but ATL shields and send the tokens out with people so you can transfer back to atl.

Personally i have been working on having every shard so i can operate completely independent.

However here is a simple way for you to choose.

Reasons to cross shard
Idocs - Go see how many idocs you can find and if its worth it for you to be there.
EM events - See which EMs you like, personally i chose EMs that are very vocal about who, what, when and where. and update the days of events as early as possible.
Merchandise merchant - certain shards sell items for less than atl. Buying on one shard to sell on atl has become a thing.
PvP - Now with this one its kind of tricky. I have a pvper on almost every shard now because of the "hot spot" trend. Seems like every 6 months there is a "new awesome shard for pvp"
General Population - Get in gen chat and talk with some of the locals. perhaps meet a new friend.
Artie farming - Finding a dead shard to do champ spawns, find legendaries, mine... etc. etc... if you are in to that thing... find one you dont lag on and no one bothers you.

Each one scores a point. shards with the most points are the ones you pick.

Stratics Veteran

I am not sure which shard you consider your home shard, mine is Baja and I chose my first 6 based on my needs for my chars. on my home shard. We all know that those needs change and that other shards change and what we once found on our first picks may or may not fill our needs when we started picking them. For the most part my needs are still being filled so I started to look at where I might want to develope other chars and started to look for shards that have the same type of players that Baja has and to be very honest just about any shard other than Atl has a majority of friendly players always willing to help and you can talk in gen chat without all the childish BS, puts on flame suit because we all know it is coming. Yes I do have Atl shields and I thank Atl for all the gold they have given me for my goods to help fill my needs as I go to other shards to buy stuff.

i picked 4 shards i have houses on.
Sonoma, ATL, GL and LA.
that way i can move supplies i may need around.
after that i just picked 2 each year after that and i usually picked one East and one West coast shards per year.
now that im almost done my collection im gonna pick up a couple more Sonoma and ATL ones because i have found i do 10X more jumps between those 2 then all the others combined.

also i took another one of my accounts and im picking up all the Asian shards on that one.
i thought it would just be too much to have them all one one account.
this way i can when collecting say easter baskets at easter time i can be jumping both on North American shards and Asian shards at the same time rather then doing 27 jumps all on one account which would take you a entire month to collect.
so i halved my time for collecting when i have to do all the shards.

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